The answer to the question lies in the question itself:
"What does equality mean today? If you start to think about this idea of equality of outcome, or the injustice of inequality, at which point is equality of outcome just? At which point is it unjust? Looking at our world today, and looking at inequality, how do we know that some inequality is a sign of injustice, and some is the way of life?
And that answer is: it's ALL a way of life...and no one and nothing in that life is ever equal.
We should remember what our mothers told us: Life, my friends, is not fair. It's never been fair; it won't be fair; it's not intended to be fair; and it's not up to us or anyone to make it fair.
And what the hell is 'fair' anyway?
When my Mom split a candy bar for my brother and me...she tried to do so as 'fairly' as possible, meaning -- since there were two of us -- that she sought to cut it into two equally sized pieces. That was fair because the only real criteria to judge fairness was an absolute and total equality of outcome. One of us would have screamed bloody murder, otherwise.
But is it fair if that same brother, who's 6'7" got to start on our school's BBall team, and I didn't? Sure it was, because the goal there was not 'equality of outcome' it was (and is) 'appropriate outcome', meaning a process outcome which fits the process input, given the process goal. In this case, the goal was to build a winning BBall Team. The input was a collection of wanna-be players. And the process was the evaluation of how good any individual wanna-be actually was. At 5'9" my BBall 'goodness' did not compensate for my missing 10" of height. I didn't like it, but it was eminently fair.
Is it fair that I'm not as good-looking as the young Mel Gibson?
Is it fair I'm not as rich as Jeff Bezos?
Is it fair that my father ran a punch press and my mother taught 4th grade?
Is it fair I'm this old!
Is it fair I've never had a date with Monica Bellucci, Catherine Deneuve, or Halle Berry?
These are all stupid questions. No. Yes. The real answer is, it doesn't matter. And it doesn't matter because it simply IS, nor is it up to us mere mortals to try to 'fix' the reality which IS.
Vonnegut, in "Harrison Bergeron" told us about fixing it...."THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was
stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213 th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General"....and her shotgun. Fixing it is a no good, very bad, horrible, terrible option.
And then there's the idea of 'historical justice'.
Something happened a long time ago to somebody who looked vaguely like me...and it was caused by someone, way back then, who looked vaguely like you. THEREFORE, so the Historical Justice People tells us, YOU OWE ME. And that, they say, would be justice.
But what about before then? What about over the last 20 generations+? We each have, across that time about 2M blood-line ancestors. How many suffered injustice? How many committed it? How many thieves, murderers, victims, et al... were there in that 2M and how did my 2M relate to yours???In the end we ask: what's the net loss or gain after 20 generations and 2M ancestors (of whom we maybe can name 20? if we're lucky)...and who the heck writes the check? Each to ourselves I guess.
It's a fool's errand. And we are fools to chase it.
Mark Helprin, the novelist, writes of this ...from his classic "Winters Tale":
"“I see no justice in that plan."
"Who said," lashed out Isaac Penn, "that you, a man, can always perceive justice? Who said that justice is what you imagine? Can you be sure that you know it when you see it, that you will live long enough to recognize the decisive thunder of its occurrence, that it can be manifest within a generation, within ten generations, within the entire span of human existence? What you are talking about is common sense, not justice. Justice is higher and not as easy to understand -- until it presents itself in unmistakable splendor. The design of which I speak is far above our understanding. But we can sometimes feel its presence.
"No choreographer, no architect, engineer, or painter could plan more thoroughly and subtly. Every action and every scene has its purpose. And the less power one has, the closer he is to the great waves that sweep through all things, patiently preparing them for the approach of a future signified not by simple human equity (a child could think of that), but by luminous and surprising connections that we have not imagined, by illustrations terrifying and benevolent -- a golden age that will show not what we wish, but some bare awkward truth upon which rests everything that ever was and everything that ever will be. There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery.”
"Getting and spending we lay waste our powers".... and to scurry, endlessly, trying to determine whether this 'unfairness' (whatever that means) was earned/deserved/or is otherwise appropriate is and will always be nothing but utter waste.
And so we beat on, boats against the current....tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther!
In the end, what else is there? As Romper Room used to tell us, just do your best because that's all you can do.
"I’d be much more willing to hear arguments about wealth redistribution if that wealth was devoted to the development of infants, children, and teens rather than if it took the form of payments to adults."
Really? I'm not sure if this a real policy preference or not, or just an attempt to signal that you really care about equality of opportunity. (And why just limit this to people in the US?) If it is the former, consider that terrible record of the government trying to mandate what people spend aid on. Do you really have any reason to think this would turn out differently? In general, for all their flaws, aid recipients are in a better position to know what is best for them and their families than the state. One would think to an economist this would be axiomatic.
BTW, I'm not sure there is a great state-based solution to inequality or opportunity beyond equal protection under the law. The other thing that helps is (i) fostering a general sense that people should try to help out those le4ss fortunate that we believe to be good people, and (ii) suggesting ways that families might make life better for their kids, but these are not really things government is good at.
But it is also true that living with this sort of family circumstance-based of inequality is not a terrible outcome. The standard of living for almost everyone in the US is steadily rising. People's happiness tends to adjust with circumstances and not increase much with wealth past a certain relatively achievable level. It is true that people want the status that goes with wealth, but they also want status in a bunch of other realms as well meaning that wealth doesn't really have that big an effect on one's satisfaction with status.
None of this isn't to say that equality of opportunity isn't a good value to have, just they we need not fetishize its importance and sacrifice a bunch of other useful values along the way in pursuit of an equality that becomes more and more costly to achieve as we get closer to it.
Tgere are some very good points there, but many are theoretical.
I'm currently dealing with a very specific issue, that has me rethinking my more tolerant and liberal positions on race.
I work in safety in very hazardous chemical manufacturing. I deal with a rural plant in the South. Mixed work force.
There are clear behavioral differences and attitudes.
For example, music is allowed so long as it's not a safety issue. In practice there are two factors involved:
1. The ability to hear alarms, calls on the radio, and otherwise communicate without screaming. That works out to about 65dB.
2. Preventing hearing damage. The time weighted average is 85dB.
Only Black employees repeatedly violate these principles. I have a dB meter. White employees have occasionally drifted to 70, but that's been a function of song shift (or more often, commercials). Black employees routinely hit 105-110.
There's also an issue with earbuds. At this point, I don't care if they get flattened by a forklift. Three warnings and it's in Darwin's hands.
They're explicitly defiant, turning it back up seconds after I leave, and in my view, should be fired.
Unfortunately, HR is worried about publicity and complaints afraid it will be perceived as racial (but not about publicity if they miss an alarm, and we wipe out the neighborhood).
I have junior, female engineers where the young black men will sing along with sexually violent lyrics, making them uncomfortable, when the engineers are trying to do their jobs.
There's a clear misogyny problem, that they try and pass off as the engineers just being "Karens" and afraid of Black men.
(Never mind the support of a couple for Trump because of his sexual finding, and them justifying his behaviour).
As it works, their behavior has made it a requirement to be put where they can do the least damage. That's often the packaging line. Lowest pay, hardest work. Not working with the engineers.
There are opportunities for advancement and training. The most lucrative is E&I tech. This is a serious job that easily goes into 6 figures at refineries and hazardous chemical plants. Probably at automotive as well, but I dont have that data. It's safety critical, and involves working with and reporting to women.
The inability and unwillingness to follow basic rules, means the majority of the Black employees will never be given the opportunity to advance. Same with the sexism.
They've been taught that every disparity is a product of racism.
There's no early intervention advantage at work. It's a cultural and attitude problem.
I mean...not calling people in supervisory positions sexually derogatory names and saying you'd like to rape them isn't rocket science.
Neither is just leaving music at a background level to do a job competently.
Are there ones getting included because they want to fit in with the other black men? Probably. But it's not unfair. They're still behaving the same, and it's no one's fault but their own.
There are also ones that make it a point to find black artists that aren't all about drugs, gangs, and disrespecting women.
But where white employees have near 100% compliance, it's under 50% for Black.
P.S. The women are fine with "Baby got Back", "Fat Bottomed Girls", "You Shook Me All Night Long", etc. It's when it gets violent, non-consensual, or degrading.
I would be interested in your thoughts on "optimal" intergenerational persistence of economic outcomes. "Shuffling the deck" has some clear benefits, but does it have some costs, too? I have in mind here the idea that parents care very much about their children's relative position, that policy to undo wealthy parents' effort to transmit their economic status to their kids acts, like a gift/estate tax, as a limit on that transmission, and that it might have various incentive effects on parents. None of this is to say that we shouldn't try - perhaps harder - to help kids from poor families, but I wonder if there could be a kind of Laffer curve in the space where the X-axis is the taxation on human capital transmission across generations and the Y-axis is something like "parental effort." Put differently, if the state were going to make sure that you can't affect your kids' outcomes, why invest in your kids?
In the first half of the 1990's, my wife worked for a professional services firm in NYC. The firm arranged for members of its staff to tutor students in Harlem for a half day, once a week. At the orientation meeting the first year, my wife reported school administration told them - If we don't reach these kids by the age of 10, they are lost. This stunned me then and still does today. I would have hated to be judged by my 20-year old self, let alone at age 10.
I've just finished reading Thomas Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals." Anybody who professes to want to comprehend the history of black/white interactions MUST read his books. For those who haven't, Sowell is a black man who 'is up in years'. Like me, he doesn't have to read a history book or go to history class to know about MLK, Jim Crow and the Dixiecrats. For Sowell and me, it was current events.
People don't realize that, in that time, and even with the racism, the black family was a tight unit, and that black public school was relatively successful. If you want the details, read his book.
Sowell lambasts LBJ's Great Society programs that were instituted in the 1960s. He makes the direct accusation that those polices are responsible for the destruction of the black family and the disintegrating value of public education. Keep in mind, the government and culture we have today IS the Great Society. How's it working out for you?
We keep dancing around progressive ideology as if it is some sort of lynchpin (No pun intended). We would do better to just dismiss it as the failure that it is, and move on.
Do people in the ghetto have less opportunity than people the suburbs? That's likely. But do they have less opportunity than people in rural areas? Good question. But nobody ever addresses it. And in case you aren't aware, there are more blacks living in rural areas than in the ghettos. Why are they ignored?
So, let's look at things in a way that progressives love to ignore: Higher levels of success are not normal. Being average does not constitute success; being above average does. How does equity jive with that? It doesn't. One of them has gotta go. Let's work on success, and forget equity.
There is not one person in the ghetto, or in rural areas, who can't be successful. And indeed, many are. And there is no one in the suburbs who is guaranteed success, and many do indeed fail. Why does progressivism ignore these points? There's a reason for that: Progressivism is an ideology of communism and socialism, of group thinking, of herd mentality. They say things like, nobody succeeds, unless we all succeed. That's a crock. There's all kinds of successful people, even as many fail. Why don't we examine the characteristics that make for success, instead of repeating myths about skin color?
MLK wanted his kids to be judged by the content of their character. We aren't doing that. We are STILL judging by the color of their skin.
Glenn, I agree with general point, and at the same time, I prefer to frame "culture" through the lens of incentives.
As you yourself wrote[0] in 2007, "It is not an adequate account to say that dysfunctional behavior in an oppressed group simply shows that 'those people' have the wrong utility functions, when their utility functions have emerged from a set of social formations that have been historically generated by our own structures and activities."
Of course culture matters. But critiquing the flaws of black culture doesn't fix it. Remember when LeBron and other NBA players wore glasses and got photographed reading (page 1 of) books? Cultural change cannot be forced from on high.
In a number of your podcasts with John McWhorter, I've heard you repeatedly dismiss the impact of "microaggressions", of feeling uncomfortable as the only black person in the room. And while I readily acknowledge the great progress our society has made in eg your lifetime, I think it's worth recognizing that the subjective perception of feeling disrespected/at a deficit of social status — above and beyond measurable discrimination — makes many black people feel less incentive to attain positions in these institutions.
Indeed, I think that much of the frustration you have — and that I share — with affirmative action policies is that they negate for their beneficiaries the signaling value of credentials. An Asian Ivy Leaguer is presumed to be super smart, and almost nothing they say can change that perception; a black Ivy Leaguer is presumed to be a token, and almost nothing they say can change that perception. (A white Ivy Leaguer is presumed to be upper class...)
If one accepts that eg working at Google is less rewarding for black employees, because even at the same compensation level, they must constantly face the sense that many of their colleagues devalue their perspective, it's no wonder that black Googlers are often more concerned with reshaping society or utilizing a performance of oppression in office politics games than being the best engineer or manager they can be. DEI and other forms of institutional activism serve as a kind of non-monetary compensation, a sense of having some power to shape the institution and to compel others to listen, a sense that appears to make up for the real disparity in how enjoyable different groups find the workplace environment.
At big tech companies, and I think at universities too, there is a sense among the technical staff that they do the real hard work, and everyone else is along for the ride, and easily replaceable. As the technical side of these institutions tend to have much less black representation, there is the sense, quite like in middle school, that "black people don't do math". That, and it's corollary: the black technical staff has the "opportunity" to get accepted into the nerd in-group by dissing the non-technical blacks.
But this opportunity, besides making one feel like a traitor, is actually a trap. As a black person, if you let it be known that you prefer Bach to Biggie, if you only use black slang after the uncool whites do, you'll get treated better, to a point. Doing these things will let your white and Asian colleagues acknowledge your intellect, but it will simultaneously fill them with envy, because they will not fully understand why you've forgone all those opportunities to be cool. You'll seem inauthentic, strategic, threatening.
So, given this, joining the black affinity group, performing blackness as oppression, or whatever, and perpetuating the cultural divisions by race in society within the elite institution, starts to make more sense. Now, there's no evidence that such groups and DEI actually benefit anyone other than their participants, but some degree of selfishness is the nature of humanity.
While all these factors fit within the heading of "culture", it feels sharper to me to focus on the incentives. It's easy to denigrate black culture if one imagines that an individual or household can choose their culture, but when one sees culture as shaped by individuals making boundedly rational decisions given their vantage on the world, then we can perceive the necessity of even the most degenerate forms of cultural expression. And perhaps, start to chart a way out of the cultural local maximum.
The answer to the question lies in the question itself:
"What does equality mean today? If you start to think about this idea of equality of outcome, or the injustice of inequality, at which point is equality of outcome just? At which point is it unjust? Looking at our world today, and looking at inequality, how do we know that some inequality is a sign of injustice, and some is the way of life?
And that answer is: it's ALL a way of life...and no one and nothing in that life is ever equal.
We should remember what our mothers told us: Life, my friends, is not fair. It's never been fair; it won't be fair; it's not intended to be fair; and it's not up to us or anyone to make it fair.
And what the hell is 'fair' anyway?
When my Mom split a candy bar for my brother and me...she tried to do so as 'fairly' as possible, meaning -- since there were two of us -- that she sought to cut it into two equally sized pieces. That was fair because the only real criteria to judge fairness was an absolute and total equality of outcome. One of us would have screamed bloody murder, otherwise.
But is it fair if that same brother, who's 6'7" got to start on our school's BBall team, and I didn't? Sure it was, because the goal there was not 'equality of outcome' it was (and is) 'appropriate outcome', meaning a process outcome which fits the process input, given the process goal. In this case, the goal was to build a winning BBall Team. The input was a collection of wanna-be players. And the process was the evaluation of how good any individual wanna-be actually was. At 5'9" my BBall 'goodness' did not compensate for my missing 10" of height. I didn't like it, but it was eminently fair.
Is it fair that I'm not as good-looking as the young Mel Gibson?
Is it fair I'm not as rich as Jeff Bezos?
Is it fair that my father ran a punch press and my mother taught 4th grade?
Is it fair I'm this old!
Is it fair I've never had a date with Monica Bellucci, Catherine Deneuve, or Halle Berry?
These are all stupid questions. No. Yes. The real answer is, it doesn't matter. And it doesn't matter because it simply IS, nor is it up to us mere mortals to try to 'fix' the reality which IS.
Vonnegut, in "Harrison Bergeron" told us about fixing it...."THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was
stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213 th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General"....and her shotgun. Fixing it is a no good, very bad, horrible, terrible option.
And then there's the idea of 'historical justice'.
Something happened a long time ago to somebody who looked vaguely like me...and it was caused by someone, way back then, who looked vaguely like you. THEREFORE, so the Historical Justice People tells us, YOU OWE ME. And that, they say, would be justice.
But what about before then? What about over the last 20 generations+? We each have, across that time about 2M blood-line ancestors. How many suffered injustice? How many committed it? How many thieves, murderers, victims, et al... were there in that 2M and how did my 2M relate to yours???In the end we ask: what's the net loss or gain after 20 generations and 2M ancestors (of whom we maybe can name 20? if we're lucky)...and who the heck writes the check? Each to ourselves I guess.
It's a fool's errand. And we are fools to chase it.
Mark Helprin, the novelist, writes of this ...from his classic "Winters Tale":
"“I see no justice in that plan."
"Who said," lashed out Isaac Penn, "that you, a man, can always perceive justice? Who said that justice is what you imagine? Can you be sure that you know it when you see it, that you will live long enough to recognize the decisive thunder of its occurrence, that it can be manifest within a generation, within ten generations, within the entire span of human existence? What you are talking about is common sense, not justice. Justice is higher and not as easy to understand -- until it presents itself in unmistakable splendor. The design of which I speak is far above our understanding. But we can sometimes feel its presence.
"No choreographer, no architect, engineer, or painter could plan more thoroughly and subtly. Every action and every scene has its purpose. And the less power one has, the closer he is to the great waves that sweep through all things, patiently preparing them for the approach of a future signified not by simple human equity (a child could think of that), but by luminous and surprising connections that we have not imagined, by illustrations terrifying and benevolent -- a golden age that will show not what we wish, but some bare awkward truth upon which rests everything that ever was and everything that ever will be. There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery.”
"Getting and spending we lay waste our powers".... and to scurry, endlessly, trying to determine whether this 'unfairness' (whatever that means) was earned/deserved/or is otherwise appropriate is and will always be nothing but utter waste.
And so we beat on, boats against the current....tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther!
In the end, what else is there? As Romper Room used to tell us, just do your best because that's all you can do.
"I’d be much more willing to hear arguments about wealth redistribution if that wealth was devoted to the development of infants, children, and teens rather than if it took the form of payments to adults."
Really? I'm not sure if this a real policy preference or not, or just an attempt to signal that you really care about equality of opportunity. (And why just limit this to people in the US?) If it is the former, consider that terrible record of the government trying to mandate what people spend aid on. Do you really have any reason to think this would turn out differently? In general, for all their flaws, aid recipients are in a better position to know what is best for them and their families than the state. One would think to an economist this would be axiomatic.
BTW, I'm not sure there is a great state-based solution to inequality or opportunity beyond equal protection under the law. The other thing that helps is (i) fostering a general sense that people should try to help out those le4ss fortunate that we believe to be good people, and (ii) suggesting ways that families might make life better for their kids, but these are not really things government is good at.
But it is also true that living with this sort of family circumstance-based of inequality is not a terrible outcome. The standard of living for almost everyone in the US is steadily rising. People's happiness tends to adjust with circumstances and not increase much with wealth past a certain relatively achievable level. It is true that people want the status that goes with wealth, but they also want status in a bunch of other realms as well meaning that wealth doesn't really have that big an effect on one's satisfaction with status.
None of this isn't to say that equality of opportunity isn't a good value to have, just they we need not fetishize its importance and sacrifice a bunch of other useful values along the way in pursuit of an equality that becomes more and more costly to achieve as we get closer to it.
Tgere are some very good points there, but many are theoretical.
I'm currently dealing with a very specific issue, that has me rethinking my more tolerant and liberal positions on race.
I work in safety in very hazardous chemical manufacturing. I deal with a rural plant in the South. Mixed work force.
There are clear behavioral differences and attitudes.
For example, music is allowed so long as it's not a safety issue. In practice there are two factors involved:
1. The ability to hear alarms, calls on the radio, and otherwise communicate without screaming. That works out to about 65dB.
2. Preventing hearing damage. The time weighted average is 85dB.
Only Black employees repeatedly violate these principles. I have a dB meter. White employees have occasionally drifted to 70, but that's been a function of song shift (or more often, commercials). Black employees routinely hit 105-110.
There's also an issue with earbuds. At this point, I don't care if they get flattened by a forklift. Three warnings and it's in Darwin's hands.
They're explicitly defiant, turning it back up seconds after I leave, and in my view, should be fired.
Unfortunately, HR is worried about publicity and complaints afraid it will be perceived as racial (but not about publicity if they miss an alarm, and we wipe out the neighborhood).
I have junior, female engineers where the young black men will sing along with sexually violent lyrics, making them uncomfortable, when the engineers are trying to do their jobs.
There's a clear misogyny problem, that they try and pass off as the engineers just being "Karens" and afraid of Black men.
(Never mind the support of a couple for Trump because of his sexual finding, and them justifying his behaviour).
As it works, their behavior has made it a requirement to be put where they can do the least damage. That's often the packaging line. Lowest pay, hardest work. Not working with the engineers.
There are opportunities for advancement and training. The most lucrative is E&I tech. This is a serious job that easily goes into 6 figures at refineries and hazardous chemical plants. Probably at automotive as well, but I dont have that data. It's safety critical, and involves working with and reporting to women.
The inability and unwillingness to follow basic rules, means the majority of the Black employees will never be given the opportunity to advance. Same with the sexism.
They've been taught that every disparity is a product of racism.
There's no early intervention advantage at work. It's a cultural and attitude problem.
I mean...not calling people in supervisory positions sexually derogatory names and saying you'd like to rape them isn't rocket science.
Neither is just leaving music at a background level to do a job competently.
Are there ones getting included because they want to fit in with the other black men? Probably. But it's not unfair. They're still behaving the same, and it's no one's fault but their own.
There are also ones that make it a point to find black artists that aren't all about drugs, gangs, and disrespecting women.
But where white employees have near 100% compliance, it's under 50% for Black.
P.S. The women are fine with "Baby got Back", "Fat Bottomed Girls", "You Shook Me All Night Long", etc. It's when it gets violent, non-consensual, or degrading.
I would be interested in your thoughts on "optimal" intergenerational persistence of economic outcomes. "Shuffling the deck" has some clear benefits, but does it have some costs, too? I have in mind here the idea that parents care very much about their children's relative position, that policy to undo wealthy parents' effort to transmit their economic status to their kids acts, like a gift/estate tax, as a limit on that transmission, and that it might have various incentive effects on parents. None of this is to say that we shouldn't try - perhaps harder - to help kids from poor families, but I wonder if there could be a kind of Laffer curve in the space where the X-axis is the taxation on human capital transmission across generations and the Y-axis is something like "parental effort." Put differently, if the state were going to make sure that you can't affect your kids' outcomes, why invest in your kids?
In the first half of the 1990's, my wife worked for a professional services firm in NYC. The firm arranged for members of its staff to tutor students in Harlem for a half day, once a week. At the orientation meeting the first year, my wife reported school administration told them - If we don't reach these kids by the age of 10, they are lost. This stunned me then and still does today. I would have hated to be judged by my 20-year old self, let alone at age 10.
I've just finished reading Thomas Sowell's "Black Rednecks and White Liberals." Anybody who professes to want to comprehend the history of black/white interactions MUST read his books. For those who haven't, Sowell is a black man who 'is up in years'. Like me, he doesn't have to read a history book or go to history class to know about MLK, Jim Crow and the Dixiecrats. For Sowell and me, it was current events.
People don't realize that, in that time, and even with the racism, the black family was a tight unit, and that black public school was relatively successful. If you want the details, read his book.
Sowell lambasts LBJ's Great Society programs that were instituted in the 1960s. He makes the direct accusation that those polices are responsible for the destruction of the black family and the disintegrating value of public education. Keep in mind, the government and culture we have today IS the Great Society. How's it working out for you?
We keep dancing around progressive ideology as if it is some sort of lynchpin (No pun intended). We would do better to just dismiss it as the failure that it is, and move on.
Do people in the ghetto have less opportunity than people the suburbs? That's likely. But do they have less opportunity than people in rural areas? Good question. But nobody ever addresses it. And in case you aren't aware, there are more blacks living in rural areas than in the ghettos. Why are they ignored?
So, let's look at things in a way that progressives love to ignore: Higher levels of success are not normal. Being average does not constitute success; being above average does. How does equity jive with that? It doesn't. One of them has gotta go. Let's work on success, and forget equity.
There is not one person in the ghetto, or in rural areas, who can't be successful. And indeed, many are. And there is no one in the suburbs who is guaranteed success, and many do indeed fail. Why does progressivism ignore these points? There's a reason for that: Progressivism is an ideology of communism and socialism, of group thinking, of herd mentality. They say things like, nobody succeeds, unless we all succeed. That's a crock. There's all kinds of successful people, even as many fail. Why don't we examine the characteristics that make for success, instead of repeating myths about skin color?
MLK wanted his kids to be judged by the content of their character. We aren't doing that. We are STILL judging by the color of their skin.
Glenn, I agree with general point, and at the same time, I prefer to frame "culture" through the lens of incentives.
As you yourself wrote[0] in 2007, "It is not an adequate account to say that dysfunctional behavior in an oppressed group simply shows that 'those people' have the wrong utility functions, when their utility functions have emerged from a set of social formations that have been historically generated by our own structures and activities."
Of course culture matters. But critiquing the flaws of black culture doesn't fix it. Remember when LeBron and other NBA players wore glasses and got photographed reading (page 1 of) books? Cultural change cannot be forced from on high.
In a number of your podcasts with John McWhorter, I've heard you repeatedly dismiss the impact of "microaggressions", of feeling uncomfortable as the only black person in the room. And while I readily acknowledge the great progress our society has made in eg your lifetime, I think it's worth recognizing that the subjective perception of feeling disrespected/at a deficit of social status — above and beyond measurable discrimination — makes many black people feel less incentive to attain positions in these institutions.
Indeed, I think that much of the frustration you have — and that I share — with affirmative action policies is that they negate for their beneficiaries the signaling value of credentials. An Asian Ivy Leaguer is presumed to be super smart, and almost nothing they say can change that perception; a black Ivy Leaguer is presumed to be a token, and almost nothing they say can change that perception. (A white Ivy Leaguer is presumed to be upper class...)
If one accepts that eg working at Google is less rewarding for black employees, because even at the same compensation level, they must constantly face the sense that many of their colleagues devalue their perspective, it's no wonder that black Googlers are often more concerned with reshaping society or utilizing a performance of oppression in office politics games than being the best engineer or manager they can be. DEI and other forms of institutional activism serve as a kind of non-monetary compensation, a sense of having some power to shape the institution and to compel others to listen, a sense that appears to make up for the real disparity in how enjoyable different groups find the workplace environment.
At big tech companies, and I think at universities too, there is a sense among the technical staff that they do the real hard work, and everyone else is along for the ride, and easily replaceable. As the technical side of these institutions tend to have much less black representation, there is the sense, quite like in middle school, that "black people don't do math". That, and it's corollary: the black technical staff has the "opportunity" to get accepted into the nerd in-group by dissing the non-technical blacks.
But this opportunity, besides making one feel like a traitor, is actually a trap. As a black person, if you let it be known that you prefer Bach to Biggie, if you only use black slang after the uncool whites do, you'll get treated better, to a point. Doing these things will let your white and Asian colleagues acknowledge your intellect, but it will simultaneously fill them with envy, because they will not fully understand why you've forgone all those opportunities to be cool. You'll seem inauthentic, strategic, threatening.
So, given this, joining the black affinity group, performing blackness as oppression, or whatever, and perpetuating the cultural divisions by race in society within the elite institution, starts to make more sense. Now, there's no evidence that such groups and DEI actually benefit anyone other than their participants, but some degree of selfishness is the nature of humanity.
While all these factors fit within the heading of "culture", it feels sharper to me to focus on the incentives. It's easy to denigrate black culture if one imagines that an individual or household can choose their culture, but when one sees culture as shaped by individuals making boundedly rational decisions given their vantage on the world, then we can perceive the necessity of even the most degenerate forms of cultural expression. And perhaps, start to chart a way out of the cultural local maximum.
[0]: https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Economics/Faculty/Glenn_Loury/louryhomepage/cvandbio/Relations%20Before%20Transactions%20Loury.pdf